Friday, March 13, 2015

Friday the 13th Sunset

The superstitious fear this day, where bad luck is supposed to abound and one must be extra wary. Me? I ride a URAL Sidecar Rig, I already take a chance every time I ride! ;)

Kidding of course, I love riding my URAL sidecar rig, along with my other motorcycle, Brigitta.

Scarlett is in the shop for repairs on her clutch at the present, so I rode Brigitta, my '87 BMW R80 Airhead this evening to catch what turned out to be a pretty glorious sunset.

I rode to the "Plains Learning Center" located on Quincy Road near my home neighborhood. You learn about life in the Colorado Prairies back in the 1800s here.

First, I took a few pictures of Brigitta before I put the camera into time-lapse mode.

Shot in "Enhanced Smart Mode"

Shot in "Sunset Mode"

Next, it was time to go into "time-lapse, sunset" mode. For the curious, the camera time-lapse app locks in the F-Stop and ISO to f8 and 100 and uses auto exposure tracking (low mode by default) to adjust shutter speed as the light from the sun grows dim.

I also set it for Aperture priority so everything would be in focus, longer focal depth you see. I could have gone higher than f8 I think but everything looked fine on the LCD screen so I left it alone this time.

The Sunset mode in the time-lapse app sets it to take a picture every ten seconds, for 40 minutes, to produce a 24 fps frame rate which is what works apparently for the human eye.

I just stood there and enjoyed the colors paint the evening sky with their bright yellows and oranges fading to red and purples....quiet nice. I hope you enjoy the video:

The time-lapse app was also set to take pictures each time the camera shot for the video. That's 240 pictures to choose from!

Here's a few that stood out: (Note, I edited the below in photoshop to include the "lit" headlight from shots prior to the time-lapse sequence of photos)

The pictures above of course don't come close to doing justice to the wonderful colors displayed by Nature.

Beautiful! I love the time lapse. As for Friday the 13th, to my way of thinking you have to be more careful on Saturday the 14th because most people let their guards down and that's when things go wanky.